I think it's great to disagree with Core. It's unfortunate that they chose to pursue this change because it doesn't seem to be necessary at all and it has caused a lot of chaos within the community, which was frankly the last thing we needed. Nevertheless, Bitcoin is made to survive adversity and it's up to node runners to guarantee its success in the long term.

As for Citrea, I'm not excusing them or anything. I think development on Bitcoin should be permissionless, so let them try build new stuff. They can turn Bitcoin into Ethereum only if the vast majority of users actually think that's valuable and start bridging their sats to their L2. I have no reason to believe this is going to happen.

The other unfortunate thing is that Citrea has developed its protocol in such a way as to require more than 80 bytes of arbitrary data, meaning they are going to publish it on the witness instead of as an OP_RETURN output. Had they been less careless with their technical choices, we would probably not be here. Hence my use of the term "unfortunate".